Gunman Assassinates U.S. Congresswoman

[giblets]

He's not a terrorist because he didn't have any goals. Duh. Al Qaeda is waging asymmetric war against the US. This guy was a loner with a handgun. Al Qaeda makes attacks in order to scare people. This guy was a crazy man with some unhealthy obsessions.

Who says his "unhealthy obsessions" aren't goals? Or Al Qaeda's goals aren't "unhealthy obsessions"? Is it healthy to be an islamic terrorist, or sane, or not obsessive?

[Asher]

It's simple, HC. To you and most Americans, terrorists aren't crazy people -- they're Muslims.

White people aren't terrorists, they're just crazy people.

The obliviousness of the intersection of the two is amusing.

[Aeson]

Wow, you found one of our gun nuts. Well done.

No, Asher found him.

[The Mad Monk]

Postings of a Troubled Mind
Accused Shooter Wrote on Gaming Site of His Job Woes, Rejection by Women.

By ALEXANDRA BERZON, JOHN R. EMSHWILLER And ROBERT A. GUTH
Last May 9, at two in the morning, Jared Lee Loughner typed a question to a group of about 50 online gamers located around the world: "Does anyone have aggression 24/7?"

He was back at his keyboard the following night. "If you went to prison right now...What would you be thinking?" he asked.


Online postings last year by accused gunman Jared Lee Loughner.
.A trove of 131 online-forum postings written between April and June 2010, which were viewed by The Wall Street Journal, provides insight into Mr. Loughner's mind-set in the year leading up to Saturday's shootings in Tucson, Ariz. He stands accused of killing six people, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D., Ariz.) and injuring 13 others.

The online postings paint a picture of a disturbed young man trying to impress his peers and struggling to find a purpose to his life. They range from prosaic chatter about weight lifting to nonsensical philosophical ramblings that left some of the gamers who read them wondering whether he was using drugs or had a mental disability.

On Tuesday, after a search of the Loughners' home, federal investigators found a letter from Rep. Giffords's office in which Mr. Loughner had scribbled the words "Die Cops" and "Die *****," said Capt. Chris Nanos of the Pima County Sheriff's Department. Capt. Nanos, who was briefed on the findings, said Mr. Loughner had also referenced an assassination in handwritten notes on the letter.

Journal Community
..The letter, dated 2007, was a form document sent by the staff of Rep. Giffords to thank Mr. Loughner for attending one of her events.

Capt. Nanos confirmed that Tucson local authorities had visited the Loughners' house in the past for minor incidents unrelated to the suspect, except for once: Around 2006 or 2007, the suspect called the authorities to report a case of identity theft. "Someone had used his name on MySpace or Facebook," Capt. Nanos said.

The online-forum messages exhibit a growing frustration that, at 22 years of age, Mr. Loughner couldn't land a minimum-wage job and was spurned by women. By May 15, he wrote, he hadn't had a paycheck in six months. A month later, he wrote that he had submitted 65 applications, yet "no interview."

.At times, Mr. Loughner seemed to be reaching out to fellow gamers for help and advice, albeit in a disturbing way. Sometimes they offered it, such as giving him pointers about job hunting. At other times, his postings seemed so outrageous that the gamers mocked or ignored him.

The online postings, written using pseudonyms, were shared with the Journal by a person who had access to them. Two fellow gamers who participated in the online forums say the author was the accused gunman, and some of the postings discuss incidents from Mr. Loughner's life that others have corroborated.

Judy Clarke and Mark Fleming, two defense lawyers assigned to represent Mr. Loughner, didn't respond to phone messages left at their San Diego offices. Federal authorities have said they have seized Mr. Loughner's computer and are trying to examine all of the online places where he spent time. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Jared Loughner's family made their first public comments Tuesday.
.Mr. Loughner's family on Tuesday made its first comments since the shootings. In a written statement, Randy and Amy Loughner said they couldn't understand what motivated their son and expressed condolences for the victims and their families. "There are no words that can possibly express how we feel," they said. "We are so very sorry for their loss."

Mr. Loughner had a history of asking provocative questions. In early high school, he asked unusual questions that were innocent, such as one time when he asked a friend about the purpose of human toes, recalls Joseph Headlee, a former high-school classmate.

His recent online postings are more disturbing. On April 24, he asked: "Would you hit a Handy Cap Child/ Adult?" On May 20 at 12:03 a.m., he remarked: "I bet your hungry....Because i know how to cut a body open and eat you for more then a week. ;-)"

The postings exhibit fixations on grammar, the education system, government and currency, which some friends and acquaintances have described separately in the days since the attack. They are peppered with displays of misogyny.

Mr. Loughner's posts don't mention Rep. Giffords, who is believed to have been the target of the attack, nor do they give any indication that Mr. Loughner was plotting a shooting. But several mention mental breakdowns and violent thoughts. One post alluded to the Fifth Amendment, which aims to protect citizens against the government abusing its power in legal proceedings.

.Mr. Loughner posted the messages in a private forum associated with the online game Earth Empires. On Tuesday, the site's administrator in a public forum admonished members for sharing information with the media.

In a separate forum, the administrator wrote that he would cooperate with federal authorities if asked. "I want this information to get to the right hands, but I want to make sure it's done through the proper legal means," he wrote.

Gaming appears to have been an important part of Mr. Loughner's life. In the 7th grade, he and a friend, Alex Montanaro, began playing the multiplayer online games Starcraft and Diablo, which featured complex virtual worlds where players assume roles and play against other people around the globe, Mr. Montanaro said in emails over the weekend and Monday.

Around the 9th grade, recalls Mr. Montanaro, Mr. Loughner abandoned the old games and started playing Earth: 2025, now called Earth Empires, a text-based game in which players assume the form of a country and develop its economy. Players form clans and battle other clans.

The game includes social networks built around the clan alliances—private online forums in which players conversed. In those forums at that time, Mr. Loughner often spouted conspiracy theories and got into heated debates with others, according to a forum participant who has been reading Mr. Loughner's posts for years. Mr. Loughner originally played under the pseudonyms Cries and Cry. At various times he also used the aliases Heroin, XTC and Erad, according to two people familiar with the matter, and played for various clans.

A high-school classmate shows reporters his yearbook.
.Around 10th grade, Mr. Loughner began acting more strangely and separating from his friends, according to Mr. Montanaro. Mr. Loughner took a break from the gaming world in 2008 but resumed a year later, says Mr. Montanaro. Mr. Loughner joined an online alliance called SancTuarY/Collab. He wrote under the pseudonym Dare. After last June, he stopped playing, says the games administrator.

Mr. Loughner seemed consumed with the outlet the private-posting world provided, says Mr. Montanaro, who was also part of SancT/Collab. Compared with the debates he had engaged in as a young teen, his postings were often nonsensical, say people who knew him in both settings. Mr. Montanaro described them as "weird poems coupled with 'logic' statements."

..Even in a setting that includes the raw and often raunchy thoughts of young men, Mr. Loughner's postings were startling. They show an obsession with language, a hatred of the educational system and aggression—all of which later became themes of videos posted by Mr. Loughner on YouTube in the months before the shooting. In the forum posts, Mr. Loughner never mentions any political views explicitly, nor does he name any political figures.

On April 24, Mr. Loughner titled a new online thread: "Would you hit a Handy Cap Child/ Adult?" He wrote: "This is a very interesting question….There are mental retarded children. They're possessing teachers that are typing for money. This will never stop….The drug addicts need to be weeded out to be more intelligent. The Principle of this is that them c— educators need to stop being pigs."

Later that day, he posted a rant titled "Why Rape," which said women in college enjoyed being raped. "There are Rape victims that are under the influence of a substance. The drinking is leading them to rape. The loneliness will bring you to depression. Being alone for a very long time will inevitably lead you to rape."

Some participants in the forum suggested that he must be on drugs, while others said he may be mentally impaired. One forum participant who has read his postings says it was only in retrospect, after the shootings, that he realized that Mr. Loughner appeared mentally unstable in his messages.

On April 28, Mr. Loughner wrote: "How many stars are in the universe?" Other posters responded with mathematical calculations. Later in the thread, Mr. Loughner shifted gears: "What do Chocolate cookies taste like?"

On May 2, Mr. Loughner wrote: "This forum made me feel better....," followed by the emoticon for a smiling face.

Investigators at the Loughners' home.
.The same day, he started a thread called "Weight Lifting," and asked whether anyone else lifted. He described himself as 5 feet 10 inches tall and 155 pounds, and said he could do 65 push-ups, bench press 165 pounds, and do 25 pull-ups and 100 sit-ups, "(thanks to the ab machine)." He said he could run a mile in between 6 minutes, 30 seconds, and 6 minutes, 50 seconds. "I'm flexible" after "years of stretches," he wrote. "Diet is key."

On May 14, at 10:50 p.m., Mr. Loughner begins an online thread he called, "How many applications....is a lot?" It contained what appears to be a list of 21 retail outlets he had applied to or failed to get a job at, including Crate & Barrel, Wendy's and Domino's Pizza.

Some posters expressed surprise. One noted he hasn't applied for that many jobs in his life.

Mr. Loughner had been arrested in Pima County in 2007 and charged with possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia, according to court records. His case was dismissed. In October 2008, he was arrested for scrawling graffiti on a street sign. He paid restitution and attended a diversion program, a court administrator said.

In the online forum, Mr. Loughner wrote that he was having trouble landing a job because of his work history and criminal record. He explained that he had had five "terminations," listing Peter Piper Pizza, "Chineese" fast food, Red Robin, Quiznos and Eddie Bauer. He wrote that the list of firings "will be updated." He wrote: "I'm thinking....2 misdemeanors hurt. Don't do Graffiti."

He hinted at a different problem at the Red Robin. "I had to walk out of red robin," he wrote. "Terrible situation. Mental breakdown." Mr. Montanaro, who also worked at the restaurant, says Mr. Loughner "just hated his job" and one night said "he couldn't take it anymore" and quit.

..One poster joked that the group can give him a leadership role on the video game. Mr. Loughner responded: "...Ha.....ha....ha.....And waste more time of my life...this is like my social life...I know everything is made fun of.."

One gamer advised him that in order to get a job, he needed to provide potential employers such things as references and a list of jobs he had held previously. Mr. Loughner replied in a profanity-laced message that he knew that. "CANT HOLD TERMINATION AGAINST FUTURE EMPLOYEE !" He repeated that line 117 times.

Anger increasingly permeated his postings.

On May 5, he started a thread titled "Talk, Talk, Talking about Rejection." He solicited stories of rejection by the opposite sex. The next day he wrote, "Its funny...when..they say lets go on a date about 3 times..and they dont....go..." Three days later, he wrote, "Its funny when your 60 wondering......what happen at 21."

On May 9 at 2:00 a.m., he asked: "Does anyone have aggression 24/7?" By noon, when others suggested he try smoking marijuana, he said: "No weed. No drugs. It's not like I can't see my brain."

The following night, he titled a thread: "If you went to prison right now.....What would you be thinking?" He added, "Just curious?" After others responded that they would do everything they could to avoid going to prison, including commit suicide, Mr. Loughner said, "Let's say you are in the cell for life...For nothing." A few minutes later he added, "21...going to college...no workplace."

In his online postings, he comments on problems he had at Pima Community College, which have been reported previously. His math instructor, Ben McGahee, said recently that Mr. Loughner's off-topic outbursts during class scared students and disrupted the class. Mr. Loughner was suspended from the school and withdrew last October.

On June 3 at 12:14 a.m. Mr. Loughner described one confrontation with Mr. McGahee, writing to his fellow gamers that he had asked the teacher: "Are you just getting a pay check for brainwashing?" as well as questioning if the class was a "scam" and asking, "can you tell me how to Deny math?" He wrote that the teacher told him it was a stupid question and he should "GET OUT OF MY CLASS!"

The next day, after he had to see a school counselor, he wrote: "Told her about brainwashing a child and how that can change the view of mathematics."

Since the news of Mr. Loughner's alleged role in the shootings broke, members in the public forums of Earth Empires expressed shock that one of their own would take such action, and worried that people would point fingers at the game or the community.

"This is an immeasurable tragedy, and it pains me that someone from our close-knit community could be involved in such a heinous act," the administrator wrote on Sunday. Later that day he wrote, "I reviewed some of the posts he made and they're....disturbing."

One member wrote, "I can't stand that I know him."

—James Oberman contributed to this article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703791904576075851892478080.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

[Asher]

That's pretty creepy. A few posters here come to mind reading that article...

[DaShi]

Thought the same thing reading this one.

January 9, 2011
Suspect’s Odd Behavior Caused Growing Alarm
By KIRK JOHNSON, SERGE F. KOVALESKI, DAN FROSCH and ERIC LIPTON
TUCSON — In a community college classroom here last June, on the first day of the term, the instructor in Jared L. Loughner’s basic algebra class, Ben McGahee, posed what he thought was a simple arithmetic question to his students. He was not prepared for the explosive response.

“How can you deny math instead of accepting it?” Mr. Loughner asked, after blurting out a random number, according to Mr. McGahee.

Mr. McGahee, for one, was disturbed enough by the experience to complain to school authorities, who as early as last June were apparently concerned enough themselves to have a campus officer visit the classroom. And what Mr. McGahee described as a pattern of behavior by Mr. Loughner, marked by hysterical laughter, bizarre non sequiturs and aggressive outbursts, only continued.

“I was getting concerned about the safety of the students and the school,” said Mr. McGahee, who took to glancing out of the corner of his eye when he was writing on the board for fear that Mr. Loughner might do something. “I was afraid he was going to pull out a weapon.”

A student in the class, Lynda Sorenson, 52, wrote an e-mail to a friend expressing her concerns.

“We do have one student in the class who was disruptive today, I’m not certain yet if he was on drugs (as one person surmised) or disturbed. He scares me a bit,” Ms. Sorenson wrote in an e-mail in June that was forwarded Sunday to The New York Times.

“The teacher tried to throw him out and he refused to go, so I talked to the teacher afterward. Hopefully he will be out of class very soon, and not come back with an automatic weapon.”

Mr. Loughner’s behavior grew so troubling that he was told he could no longer attend the school, and he appeared, given his various Internet postings, to find a sense of community in some of the more paranoid corners of the Internet.

Mr. Loughner seems at some point to have crossed a border. From being a young man whom acquaintances described as odd, he became the sole suspect in the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat from Arizona’s Eighth District. The police say he bought a 9-millimeter Glock handgun in November, and devised a plan to kill the congresswoman.

Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, who has taken charge of the investigation here, said at a news conference that possible links to extremist groups would be a continued focus.

“The ubiquitous nature of the Internet means that not only threats but also hate speech and other inciteful speech is much more readily available to individuals than quite clearly it was 8 or 10 or 15 years ago,” Mr. Mueller said. “That absolutely presents a challenge for us, particularly when it results in what would be lone wolves or lone offenders undertaking attacks.”

The words echoed comments by Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik, who said Saturday at a news conference that “unbalanced people” could be affected by the vitriol, anger and hatred of antigovernment rhetoric.

Mr. Loughner’s friends and acquaintances said he was left isolated by his increasingly erratic behavior, apparently exacerbated by drug use. A military official said Sunday that Mr. Loughner had failed a drug screening when he tried to enlist in the Army.

Lydian Ali, a classmate at Pima Community College, said, “He would laugh a lot at inappropriate times, and a lot of the comments he made had no relevance to the discussion topic.”

Mr. Ali, 26, continued: “He presented a poem to the class that he’d written called ‘Meathead’ that was mostly just about him going to the gym to work out. But it included a line about touching himself in the shower while thinking about girls. He was very enthusiastic when he read the poem out loud.”

At the Y.M.C.A. where Mr. Loughner worked out, he would ask the staff strange questions, like how often they disinfected the bathroom doors. Once he asked an employee how he felt “about the government taking over.” Another time, he sat in the men’s room for 30 minutes, leaving front-desk staff members to wonder what he was doing. When he emerged, he asked what year it was.

“One day it would be a tie-dye shirt, and the next he’d be dressed like a rapper, with a beanie and everything,” said a trainer at the Y.M.C.A., Ben Lujan. “It was almost like he was trying to be different people.”

The exact role of politics in Mr. Loughner’s life — or whether he had a specific political perspective at all — is harder to pin down. Investigators will have to wrestle with the difficult question of whether Mr. Loughner’s parroting the views of extremist groups was somehow more a cause of the shootings or simply a symptom of a troubled life.

Mr. McGahee, the algebra instructor, said that after he went to school officials to complain about Mr. Loughner, he was told by a counselor that Mr. Loughner had caused problems in other classes and had “extreme political views.”

But one classmate, Steven Cates, said he had tried on occasion to engage Mr. Loughner in political discussions, with no luck. He instead liked to talk about philosophy, or logic or literature, Mr. Cates said. He added that one topic that Mr. Loughner seemed to be obsessed with was the American dollar.

“He had talked about not liking the currency,” Mr. Cates said. “And he wished that the U.S. would change to a different currency because our currency is worthless.”

Some people who study right-wing militia groups and those who align themselves with the so-called Patriot movement said Mr. Loughner’s comments on subjects like the American currency and the Constitution, which he posted online in various video clips, were strikingly similar in language and tone to the voices of the Internet’s more paranoid, extremist corners.

In the text on one of the videos, for example, Mr. Loughner states, “No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver.” He also argues that “the current government officials are in power for their currency” and he uses his videos to display text about becoming a treasurer of “a new money system.”

The position, for instance, that currency not backed by a gold or silver standard is worthless is a hallmark of the far right and the militia movement, said Mark Potok, who directs research on hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“That idea is linked closely to the belief among militia supporters that the Federal Reserve is a completely private entity engaged in ripping off the American people,” Mr. Potok said.

But Mr. Loughner also posits in his Web postings the idea that the government is seeking to control people through rules and structure of grammar and language.

This is similar to the position of David Wynn Miller, 62, a former tool-and-die welder from Milwaukee who describes himself as a “Plenipotentiary-judge” seeking to correct, through a mathematical formula, what he sees as the erroneous and manipulative use of grammar and language worldwide. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Mr. Miller a conspiracy theorist, some of whose positions have been adopted by militias in general.

“The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” Mr. Loughner said in a video. He also defiantly asserted, “You control your English grammar structure.”

Mr. Miller, in an interview, said the argument sounded familiar. “He’s probably been on my Web site, which has been up for about 11 years,” Mr. Miller said. “The government does control the schools, and the schools determine the grammar and language we use. And then it is all reinforced by newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and everything we do in society.”

Law enforcement officials said they suspected that Mr. Loughner might also have been influenced by things like American Renaissance, a conservative magazine that describes itself as “America’s premiere publication of racial-realist thought.”

“We think that white Americans have an entirely legitimate reason to want to remain a majority in the United States because when a neighborhood or a school or an organization changes in demographics and becomes majority black or Hispanic, it is no longer the same institution or neighborhood,” said Jared Taylor, its editor.

He added, “It may be shocking to hear something stated so bluntly.”

Mr. Taylor said that his organization had searched its subscriber list going back 20 years, as well as lists of those who had attended the group’s conferences since 1994, but that there was no record of a Mr. Loughner.

But even as Mr. Loughner was exploring the outer boundaries of extremist philosophy, his life at school, which some acquaintances said was very important to him, was unraveling.

Through the fall, administrators at Pima Community College became increasingly concerned as reports involving Mr. Loughner, like that day in algebra class, continued to come in.

Most of the reports, according to Paul Schwalbach, a college spokesman, were about how Mr. Loughner was “acting out” in disruptive or inappropriate ways. By last fall, officials at the college had learned about an Internet video that Mr. Loughner had prepared citing Pima College and claiming that it was in some way illegal or unconstitutional.

The college had its lawyers review the video and decided at that point to take action, drafting a letter suspending Mr. Loughner, which was delivered to his parents’ home in northwest Tucson by two police officers on Sept. 29.

At a meeting in early October at the college’s northwest campus, where he attended classes, Mr. Loughner said he would withdraw. Three days later, the college sent him a letter telling him that if he wanted to return, he would need to undergo a mental health evaluation. “After this event, there was no further college contact with Loughner,” the college said in a statement.

Mr. Cates, the former classmate, said he thought that leaving Pima was probably a major blow to Mr. Loughner.

“He was really into school. He really loved the acquisition of knowledge. He was all about that,” Mr. Cates said. “It would make sense that losing that outlet would be a negative thing for him psychologically.”

But this was just the latest in a series of blows. Mr. Loughner also tried to enlist in the Army in 2008, but failed a drug-screening test, Pentagon officials confirmed.

Some people who knew, or at least glimpsed, Mr. Loughner’s life at home with his parents, Randy and Amy Loughner, said they found the family inscrutable sometimes, and downright unpleasant at other times, especially the behavior of Randy Loughner.

“Sometimes our trash would be out, and he would come up and yell that the trash stinks,” said a next-door neighbor, Anthony Woods, 19. “He’s very aggressive.”

Mrs. Loughner has worked for the city’s Parks Department for many years, Tucson officials confirmed. Mr. Loughner’s employment, if any, was not known. Mr. Woods and his father, Stephen, 46, said they rarely saw the older Mr. Loughner go anywhere.

No one was home, or came to the door, at the Loughners’ house on Sunday morning. The house itself was mostly obscured by a tree and a huge intertwined cactus in the front.

Kylie Smith, who said she had known Mr. Loughner since elementary school, said she was struggling to reconcile her memories of the boy she knew with the portrait that the police and investigators were painting.

“It just seems so out of character for the Jared I grew up with,” Ms. Smith said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/us/10shooter.html?ref=arizonashooting2011&pagewanted=print

[The Emperor Fabulous]

I find it fascinating how the media immediately tried to pin his political alignment as right wing and even blamed it on a "climate of fear/hate" despite his favourite authors being guys like Saul Alinsky and Marx. And this isn't just Liberal media bias, the tardificent excuse for a news network called Fox news floated even crazy theories of Anti-Semitism and talk of her being the first Jewish woman to rise to a position of that level in the US (dead wrong btw), despite the fact that its seems likely that he was Jewish. His mom was Jewish after all and some friends even claim she might have attended the same synagogue as Gabrielle Giffords (Mein Kampf seems even more out of place after hearing of this, however to be fair there have been people like Bobby Fisher who might make sense of this in their heads)!

Besides the fact that you're leaving out that one of his favorite books was written by Ayn Rand, I give you this:

[b]It is appalling how one comment---a friend of Jared Loughner telling a Mother Jones’ reporter that Jared Loughner’s mother is “Jewish”---goes viral in an instant.

In hours, "this fact" was all over on anti-Semitic sites. And, of course, there are the “commentators” who love to ‘blame the victim’ via some pop psychology theory that Jared acted out of “Jewish self-hatred.”

I figured that this was the moment to try and get “truth” dressed, and into the public arena a lot faster than usual. In other words, to use the tools of the internet to determine the veracity of what this friend told Mother Jones.

I cover Jews in popular culture for Jewish newspapers and I know how often famous people are mis-identified as Jewish or mis-identified as not Jewish. I also know that a lot of people are not outright lying about claiming someone is Jewish---they just get it wrong.

So, with my friend Michael, we ran down everything we could from public records on Jared Loughner’s mother’s family background. It took a lot of “search terms” and databases to find what we did.

Here’s what we found:

Jared Lee Loughner’s mother is Amy Totman Loughner;

Amy Loughner---Known Parentage from Public Records:

Her [Amy’s] parents were Lois May Totman and Laurence Edward Totman.

----Lois M. Totman died in 1999 and Laurence E. Totman died in 2005. Both were registered nurses. Laurence worked at a VA facility in Tucson. We both found this info via google news archives, social security death index.

From 1930 census records

Laurence E. Totman was born in Illinois in 1925.

His (Laurence’s) parents were Laurence A. Totman and his wife, Mary.

Laurence Totman pere (the elder) was born in Kansas to a Pennsylvania father and an Illinois mother. Mary was from Illinois, as were both of her parents.

A sister-in-law named Myrtle M. Brennan is listed as living with them also.

1920/1910 census records---Totman Family:

In 1920, Lawrence Totman, (Jared’s) great-grandfather, is living with his aunt, Rosa Clarke, who was born in illinois to two Irish-born parents.

Rosa is his mother's sister. On the 1910 census, his (Laurence, the elder) maternal grandparents are listed as Irish-born.

Father, Orvie Totman was born in Ohio to Ohio-born parents.

Amy Loughner’s Mother’s Line:

See obit, below, from Arlington (Illinois) Daily Record, June 24, 1999---Obituary of Helen Medernach of Virgil, Illinois. Helen was the sister of Lois M. Totman (the mother of Amy Totman Loughner). Helen was the great aunt of Jared Loughner.

As you can see, Helen’s funeral (mass) was held at a Catholic church. Helen (and Lois) were the children of Anton Bleifuss and Jessie Bleifuss (nee Anderson). Lois M. Totman died just days after her sister, Helen.

According to the census records, Anton Bleifuss was born in Bremen, Germany, to German parents. Jessie Anderson Bleifuss was born in Illinois to a father born in Denmark and a mother born in Illinois.

Conclusion---It is exceedingly unlikely that Amy Loughner has any Jewish ancestry. The only “line” not traced his Amy’s father’s mother’s family. The other three lines (Amy’s father’s father, Amy’s mother’s father, and Amy’s mother mother)---show, to all but the most obtuse, that these were/are not Jewish families. Moreover, it is quite clear that Amy’s mother, Lois Bleifuss Trotman, came from a Catholic family.

Or, to make it absolutely clear:

"We had a meeting of the Tucson Board of Rabbis. We all looked at our rosters from many years back. No one has ever heard of the family -- him, his parents, any of them. I can say with absolute certainty that we do not know him in pretty much the entire affiliated community."

http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2011/01/12/2742519/loughners-jewish-mother-not-so-much

[MOBIUS]

There is virtually no question that he is right-wing. A cursory glance of his publicised beliefs/comments etc are virtually all right-wing in nature...

Gun nuts in the US that kill people for political/religious purposes are almost exclusively right-wing. Pretty obvious why, really.

[Kidlicious]

It's simple, HC. To you and most Americans, terrorists aren't crazy people -- they're Muslims.

White people aren't terrorists, they're just crazy people.

The obliviousness of the intersection of the two is amusing.

Do you actually expect HC to call someone who murders for the right wing cause a terrorist?

[Lorizael]

There is virtually no question that he is right-wing. A cursory glance of his publicised beliefs/comments etc are virtually all right-wing in nature...

Gun nuts in the US that kill people for political/religious purposes are almost exclusively right-wing. Pretty obvious why, really.

There's no point in trying to convince you that he's crazy and not right-wing since you believe the two are the same thing.

[Asher]

While he was certifiably crazy, distrust of the government is not typically a left-wing trait.

[Hauldren Collider]

While he was certifiably crazy, distrust of the government is not typically a left-wing trait.

Or is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Pink
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Truth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pe...m_protests.jpg

To name a few.

"Distrust of the government" is something invoked by whoever is currently having their ox gored or by the ACLU.

[Asher]

Or is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Pink
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Truth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pe...m_protests.jpg

To name a few.

"Distrust of the government" is something invoked by whoever is currently having their ox gored or by the ACLU.

You don't seem to comprehend the difference between recognizing wrongs by a specific administration (of course left wingers won't like right wingers in power) and fundamentally distrusting non-partisan institutions of the government...like the federal reserve.

[Hauldren Collider]

You don't seem to comprehend the difference between recognizing wrongs by a specific administration (of course left wingers won't like right wingers in power) and fundamentally distrusting non-partisan institutions of the government...like the federal reserve.

Or the FBI. Or the NSA. Or the CIA. No wait, that's democrats.

[Asher]

Or the FBI. Or the NSA. Or the CIA. No wait, that's democrats.

I know ****loads of right wingers who are wary of the NSA/CIA especially. In fact, they're almost all right-wingers.

And there's reasons to be wary of institutions whose whole purpose is to spy on you (NSA) or historically is factually known to go around assassinating people (CIA).

How many left wingers rant about the evil plans of the federal reserve?